In a keynote speech through the second-day opening session at NBAA-BACE, “Shark Tank” superstar Daymond John shared his recipe for successful entrepreneurship. The 54-year-old businessman, investor, and tv personality explained how he hustled his approach to the highest despite growing up financially strained and having no college education.
He summed up his advice for aspiring business aviation entrepreneurs in a fitting acronym, SHARK, which stands for: set your goals, do your homework, amor (or “love” in Spanish), remember your brand, and keep swimming.
“Now you within the aviation world understand setting goals, since you understand how you can set an automatic pilot,” he said, adding that when an aircraft veers off target “the automated pilot keeps bringing me back. What I spotted in life is that we may set goals on numbers we wish to hit, we may set goals on destinations and logistics, but we don’t set our personal goals.”
John explained he went from handing out flyers for only a couple bucks an hour and waiting tables at Red Lobster to constructing his own hip-hop-inspired apparel company, FUBU. When he created FUBU (“For Us By Us”) in 1992, he was working from his mom’s house, sewing hats and screen-printing t-shirts along with his logo.
“I set a goal that regardless of what, we’re gonna live, die, and prosper on this planet of hip hop,” he said. “Now the one problem was I could not rap, I could not sing, I could not dance, and I could not produce.” Yet he stuck true to his goal.
To market the brand, he convinced some upcoming hip-hop artists from his neighborhood in Queens, Recent York, to start wearing FUBU, and the brand began gaining popularity. Nevertheless it was no overnight success; it took almost 10 years, multiple near-collapses, and a $100,000 mortgage loan on his mom’s house before FUBU really took off. Today, the corporate is price greater than $6 billion.
Now a successful financier and businessman, John has an estimated net price of $350 million and infrequently travels in business jets. Although he not owns a jet, he ceaselessly charters flights.